Chapter Text
When the bubble broke, Mabel was not the same.
A technicolour rainbow of light poured through the inky blackness, burning at Mabel’s corneas in a way that overwhelmed every one of her senses. She had never been debilitated by bright lights before but it was as if she was seeing colours that she had previously been blind to and all of them wished to be perceived first. When she cried out, the voice that echoed in her eardrums was her own, but there was a melodic note to it that had not existed before. The cold swirled around her and she clawed at her eyes, rubbing grit and tears from chilled skin that felt like it should belong to a dead person instead of her.
“What’s happening?! ” she gasped, stumbling back instinctively before she realised that there was no ground beneath her feet. Her legs swung uselessly in the air, scrabbling for a ground that she couldn’t reach. Memories slammed into her with the intensity of a rhino’s charge, causing the last of the air in her lungs to putter out between dry lips. She remembered it allー the wager, the betrayal, the changeー
ーBill had changed her, he had changedー
She cracked open her eyes with a wince, the panic thrumming at the back of her skull like a prisoner beating at the walls of his cell. Everything hurt in a way that was debilitating and exhilarating all at the same time and her mind was spiralling down a madness she was scared to accept. As her eyes opened, the new colours overwhelmed her and she squeezed them shut again, burrowing deeper into a sweater that didn’t smell like the attic she stored her wool in.
She knew she had to face it eventually but the idea of letting herself open up to the new sensations felt like a defeat she wasn’t ready to accept. There was the screaming of the Nightmare Realm somewhere, echoing at the back of her mind, but it didn’t disturb her as much as it had before, the churning of her stomach long since disappearing when Bill had dragged her into her pink bubble.
With shaking fingers, she pushed her eyelids open, eyes immediately streaming from the burning sensation as she forced herself to truly look at her surroundings. She was hovering just above one of the floating platforms, colour bouncing off of every surface that she could possibly see. The blackness of the realm was no longer obsidianー instead it comprised a swirl of rainbows that shifted with every turn of her head. Her breath came out in stuttered awe, her heart aching in immediate adoration at what she could see.
Mabel loved colours more than anything. Colours were like the beach on a warm Summer’s day, blues blending into a soothing balm as hot yellows slid grittily over crimson-marked skin. It was like Autumn when orange and yellow and red became a crunch between the swaying green and her bare feet. It was like Winter with frigid whites and greys blending at the edges to be indiscernible. It was like the Springtime’s sweet greens and violets melding with the tart pinks and reds and every colour in between. Mabel felt colour like an extra appendage, the severance of it feeling like a phantom limb trying to drag itself from the grave back to her.
When they were younger, she had asked her parents if she could paint her and Dipper’s bedroom. They’d been open to the idea, but the moment she had suggested rainbow, they had immediately shot the suggestion down. They’d instead gone to Dipper and the three of them had picked a neutral tone that wouldn’t ‘wash out the rest of the house’. Mabel had nodded along in understanding at the time but, inside, she had never really forgiven them the slight.
Slowly, the burning of her eyes began to fade, but the wonder she felt at what she was seeing didn’t. Her heart was thudding loudly in her chest, eyes wide in wonder as she slowly drifted downwards until her feet landed with a soft thump against the broken cobblestone. On unsteady legs, she walked towards the edge of the platform, her eyes captivated by the sky until she looked over the edge and saw the reflection of a pool that didn’t make scientific sense.
Previously invisible to her mortal eye, the platforms were not suspended in the air but were instead floating in lakes of molten silver that reflected all colours back. The streams did not lie flat, twisting in different paths through the air and forming strange, nonsensical pillars that caressed every single broken platform. One such stream suddenly erupted at the edge of the platform before her eyes and Mabel got to see herself for the first time since she’d emerged.
The creature that stared back at her was humanoid shaped, with Mabel’s long curls looking even larger and more bouncy than they had been as a human. Her fringe covered a lot of her face but when she pushed it back, two opalescent eyes stared back at her, the white sclera and irises both being the same bluey-pink sheen with flecks of glitter making up the pupils. On her forehead and across her right cheekbone, a black shooting star seemed to be tattooed into the skin itself, as it didn’t let up when she tried to rub it off.
Her sweater was no longer present either, instead replaced with a sleeveless turtleneck that was tucked into a beautiful pleated skirt that Mabel had yearned for back on earth. The sweater was done in vertical bands of rainbow, the rolled down neck featuring a repeating pattern of black-bordered triangles that circled her throat. Simple black ballet flats and long rainbow socks made up the rest of the outfit, a large glittery star on each shoe feeling beyond right as she flexed her toes in delight.
The last detail, however, was Mabel’s arms. She drew her eyes away from her reflection to stare at the black-tipped fingers, the darkness seeping from pure black at her fingernails to a soft grey at her upper arms. White tattoos cut through the skin there, curling designs depicting Bill’s summoning circle on one forearm andー
“Is that my summoning circle?” she whispered, feeling almost in awe as she traced the white ink with a reverent finger.
“You betcha!”
Mabel jolted at the echoing voice, head swivelling until she caught sight of the toxic yellow of Bill as he materialised in the space beside her. He took a moment to preen in the mirror-like surface of the liquid tower, straightening his hat and bowtie, before he turned to offer her a gleeful glance.
“Gotta hand it to you, Shooting Star, you got style! ” he enthused, cane materialising as he gestured to all of her. “I mean, I knew you did, after all, all of your clothes look like the unicorns bled all over you, but you have truly gone above and beyond here.”
She couldn’t help it, she found herself smiling shyly up at him at the praise he directed towards her. “You think so?” she asked, shaking out her fluffy hair and catching sight of a few rainbow-dyed streaks. “I thought this was your doing, to be honest. Rang true of your sense of style.”
“Trust me, kid, I love taking credit for things I didn’t do,” he cackled, kicking his feet in the air before doing a full circle around Mabel. “But I can’t with thisー you are my new pal, after all. Gotta be honest with my friends.”
“You… think of me as your friend?” she asked quietly, unexpectedly taken aback by the sincerity beneath his words. She had known him to be a trickster, a cheat that she couldn’t trust for fear of him hurting her dearest brother again. “I thought…”
“You’re a henchmaniac now!” he stressed, gesturing out into the realm they were stranded in as if it had all the answers written there. “Of course we’re pals! Just a bunch of freaks not fitting in anywhere!”
Mabel thought back on all of the times she had felt like the odd man out. She had been called a freak a few times in Middle School, the other kids avoiding her when she got too loud or too boisterous. She had sought refuge with her beloved twin for many years, always returning to him even when he joked about how clingy she could sometimes be. Being out in Gravity Falls with him, it finally felt like it truly was them against the world, yet also having a good chance for the two of them to grow and mature into young teens preparing for high school.
What Mabel hadn’t been prepared for was the way Dipper and Ford bonding had made her feel. She’d loved Ford from the second she realised he was her Grunkle, knew he was weird like her when she held his hand and laughed at her cheer like it was a breath of fresh air. Yet he pulled away from her almost immediately, never being cruel in his words but his distance was like a yawning chasm between the two that made her heart splinter at the edges.
‘Why aren’t I good enough?’ she’d ask herself, staring up at the ceiling of the shared attic. ‘ Am I too weird for him as well? ’
At the end of it all, she knew she had Dipper at her side, and her relief from being cut out would end once Summer ended and they were back in Piedmont.
Isn’t it suffocating?
But no, even Dipper found her to be too weird for him, he just hadn’t had the courage to say so. He’d found his level of weirdness mirrored back to him in Ford and, once that hole inside of him had been filled, he no longer had need for his connection with her. She knew Dipper, knew he knew the screams of her terror like she knew his.
She couldn’t help it, the mere thought of him caused her eyes to burn with brimming tears. She’d found comfort in someone who wasn’t her best friend, her other half, and it was both a relief as well as a tragedy that she didn’t know how to process. She sniffled loudly, scrubbing at her face roughly to try and dispel the tears as they fell. When she looked down at her hands, she saw the liquid was dyed a deep violet, shimmering sluggishly back up at her with fine glitter.
“What the fuck?! ”
Her head snapped up at the disbelieving curse, her eyes widening when she saw Bill’s body tinging a similar violet hue as liquid collected in his single eye. He looked just as shocked at the sensation, staring back at her with barely concealed horror. The two stared at each other for a long, haunting moment before, almost in unison, the two let out disbelieving giggles. The giggles came out stuttered and hollow before growing louder and more consistent, the violet disappearing from them as the tears evaporated.
“ Emotions! ” Bill laughed hysterically, wiping the remnants of tears from his eyes as his golden colour was dyed a more glorious hue. “You can control others’ emotions!”
“I have so many feelings!” she wheezed, smacking herself in the chest a bunch to try and shake the giggles from it. She already had a high pain tolerance if Dipper was to be believed, but she couldn’t help but feel like the sensation was greatly dulled in comparison to normal. She’d have to examine that with more detail later. “Oh, that’s so funny.”
“I knew you were like me!” he chuckled, coming over to boop her nose with his cane. “I thought I found a companion in Sixer, thought his freakishness was a match for me, but I should have waited a few years to meet you, Shooting Star. I can see strands of the future, knew all of the Zodiac would exist at some point and had an idea as to what you’d be like, but nothing could have prepared me for the delight of actually meeting you.”
“Did… did you know you’d like me before you met me?” Mabel asked tentatively, feeling her bashfulness bubble up to the surface. She had thought herself lovable and easy to get along with but this Summer had truly altered her own self image to an alarming rate. If Bill said she had seemed like too much for him, she thought she might collapse inwards with the weight of a dying neutron star.
He levelled his gaze with hers, seeming to sense her trepidation before his eye softened as he regarded her. “I thought you were out of this world,” he answered honestly, sincerity dripping from his words as he offered her his hand. She hesitated for a moment before she took it back, feeling the roiling warmth like a living fire beneath his skin. “I am so delighted that you are here with me, with us.”
When the tears bit at her eyes this time, she blinked them away, not willing to make her new friend cry. She squeezed his hand tightly, not feeling the familiar pain of doing it beyond the comfortable limit like she sometimes did. Bill seemed to be in the same boat as he squeezed back just as hard, cackling in delight as he did so.
“Now come on!” he called, floating up into the air and pulling her, weightless, with him. “We have a gang for you to meet! You’ll love them!”